


Key to the Truth

by Churbooseanon



Series: Guns For Hire [4]
Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: Alternate Universe, Family Loss, Gen, Guns For Hire AU, Mercenaries, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-29
Updated: 2015-12-05
Packaged: 2018-05-04 00:22:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 16,348
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5312648
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Churbooseanon/pseuds/Churbooseanon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Some stories start on Adaptive. Some come to be there. The mercenary best known for his thieving ways and skill with locks proves to have more of a reason to know the tech than anyone will ever realize, and comes with quite a bone to pick.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. First Lock

**Author's Note:**

> We'll have a new chapter of this every day this week until it's finished.

Silence. A state where no, or minimal, noise is being produced. It had so many forms. Deep, profound silences as one pondered the infinite expanses of the universe or the potential limitless potential of the human mind. Tiny silences that came from trying not to be noticed, like a child in a closet during a game of hide and seek. The meek silence of the guilty caught red-handed, or the recently chided. Defiant silence that shouted down all comers, the originator certain of their superiority and righteousness. The silence of reverence, one buried in prayers, traditions, and awe. There was silence as a brief interlude in the weaving of music, making notes more poignant, and the warbling silence that fell when the music finished, leaving the mind to disgust all which had come before. And, of course, there was the intense silence of the focused mind, all of the awareness of the creator focused into something beyond simple bodily experience. 

Connor Danvers, R&D specialist with Danvers Security Systems as well as one of the two heirs of the mega-corp, was particularly talented with the final form of silence. Intensity, his older sister Claudia always told him, that often meant he forgot to consume anything that wasn’t coffee. A silence so deep and focused that it had no choice but to erupt explosively when it was broken, because anything else would leave the echo of the silence too deep in his normally noisy mind. Perhaps she was right, not that Connor would ever acknowledge such a thing. 

“EUREKA!” 

At least, he’d never confirm that he already knew she was absolutely and utterly right. Claudia was pretty good at lording those sorts of things over him. 

“Mr. Danvers,” a voice came calmly from the side of the room where the senior member of the R&D team had his own work station. There was a levelness to his voice that never failed to make Connor tremble with the slightest bit of fear, and sure enough Connor had to fight the chill that ran through him at the glacial tone. “If you would be so kind, I would ask once more that you do your best to keep your volume to a reasonable level. Causing all of us to jump while working on delicate work could be… less than fortunate.”

Connor ducked his head, a bit sheepish at the reminder, even as his superior put aside his own tools and made his way to where Connor was sitting. Sure, he felt bad about the fact that he’d done it again, probably dragging everyone in this area of the lab out of their own deep focuses, or conversations, but that didn’t change the excitement bubbling up in his stomach. Half a year he’d been working on this specific problem, and if he was right about his success--and let’s be honest, he was fucking right--then he had just really proved he deserved to be in R&D. Hell, he’d probably even proved to his mother that there was definitely more than one angle someone could take to leading this company. He didn’t need Claudia’s fancy business degrees if he knew the tech better than anyone else. 

“Let’s see what you’ve done here,” Dr. Gonzales said as he came up behind Connor and leaned over his shoulder to look at the work. Connor just leaned back in his chair, grinning widely at what he’d accomplished. It would probably take Gonzales a few minutes parsing through the code before he’d even begin to look at the simple elegance of the hologram hovering over a display dish on Connor’s desk, but he knew the reception would be positive. 

“Well,” his superior started cautiously after a moment, “I think I’d want to run it through a serious bit of testing before I gave a final verdict, but I definitely think you’re on to something here.”

“Only just ‘on to something,’ Doc? Because I feel like this is it. The breakthrough I’ve been after for months. If this works out…”

The older man nodded his agreement before standing straight, and Connor spun his chair to look at the other man. His role model really, his idol before even his parents, who hadn’t built this company from the ground floor. No, it had been his grandfather who had founded Danvers Security Systems, who had given his all to revolutionizing security through specialized encrypted locks, and it had been Dr. Gonzales who had been there from the word go, the computer programming specialist who had worked with his grandfather to make the special coding language their locks all became based on. His mother had gone into business instead to help her father manage his rapidly growing company, and his father had been a marketing specialist she had fallen in love with. They couldn’t understand what DSS was suppose to be, not like the far older Gonzales did. They hadn’t won their reputations, power, and wealth with every hair gone gray from hours in the lab working on new variations to keep ahead of the competition. They hadn’t devoted their lives to this work like his godfather had. They would only see what Connor had just done as a new step in a logical progression of lock building, and would never understand the number of intuitive jumps, illogical work-arounds, and the sheer boneheaded determination that had gone into the creation of this marvelous new system. 

Which was why Connor sat there, hanging in the pensive silence Dr. Gonzales strung out before him, waiting for the true bone his superior would throw to him. Suggesting something go to QA testing was one thing. Saying Connor was on to something was just a repetition of what had been said since he’d put forth the idea. But what he was looking for was something rarely ever given, and all the more precious for it. 

“How about we sit down and look over this step by step before we send it along?”

Connor nodded and watched as Dr. Gonzales turned away, clearly intending to go fetch his own chair so he could review Connor’s work with him in comfort. And then, just before he took that first step further away from Connor, it came. The assurance and pride and almost affection that Gonzales always seemed to save for when his subordinates had done work that impressed and marveled him. The words that made him such a good mentor, that meant when he asked them for overtime hours on testing something no one hesitated to say yes because they didn’t want to let him down. The single sentence that made every long night and abandoned weekend worth it and drove them all to higher levels of work than they’d ever thought themselves capable of. 

“And Connor? Damn good piece of work there.”

Everyone in the lab knew better than to watch the person such high praise was bestowed upon. It was to save them all from embarrassment when their time came. Which made sense. 

Connor would probably never live down the little, squirmy victory dance he did as he set his chair to spinning otherwise. 

* * * * * *

“And then he said ‘damn good piece of work there’ all nonchalant like, just that way he always does and I, super cool and suave guy I am…”

“Did that adorable tiny fist pump, booty wiggle dance you do when you’re excited,” Roxanna provided with true nonchalance before sipping her beer, not even looking at Connor to confirm or deny that idea.

“Okay, one, my victory dance isn’t adorable, and should never be described as a booty wiggle,” Connor protested immediately. “Two, I was sitting so there was no chance my butt was doing anything other than being glued to a chair like a good little R&D monkey.”

“If I were to believe that, then I think I’d have no choice but to believe my boss wants to pin me to her desk and kiss me senseless,” Roxanna shrugged his comment off, and when she turned on her barstool, Connor could see the slight smirk on her lips. 

“Yeah, we both know my sister doesn’t think like that,” Connor answered, giving his best friend and his sister’s personal secretary a pitying look. 

He still couldn’t understand what Roxanna saw in his older sister, because the two were as different as night and day. Claudia had never let go of that silver spoon thrust in her mouth when she was born, even though Connor had discarded his when he’d balked against his parents’ wishes and gone to school to learn to create, not manage. Roxanna, though, was one of those driven people who started with a poor family, a shitty neighborhood, a crap education system, and clawed her way up into her position. Even though she was just a senior secretary to his older sister, they both knew Roxanna was being looked at for the newly opened managerial spot in HR, and Connor wished her well of the position. He never stopped wondering, though, what the cheerful, energetic, and lovely woman was doing going after his boring, tight-lipped, overly critical older sister. That being said, he’d seen the fondness in both of their eyes during family dinners Roxanna had been invited to, and he knew he was happy for the both of them.

Still, he saw Roxanna as his best friend first, and his future sister-in-law second. Which was why he was here at their usual bar sharing his news of success with her before he ever considered going home to his family and explaining that yes, he’d probably just found a way for them to make even more money. A good portion of which would go into their charitable foundation of course, but he knew that was as much because his father knew that a philanthropic company was more fondly looked upon than some massive compulsion to help other people. 

And that, Connor knew, was being nowhere near fair toward his family, and he had to grimace with distaste at the thought. It left a sour taste in his mouth… or maybe that was the shitty off-band beer he was drinking, had to drink for the rest of the month because he’d lost a bet to Roxanna. Damn her she knew one of the few affectations of wealth he allowed himself was being an alcohol (and coffee) snob, why had she chosen this as his punishment? 

“You’ve got that look,” Roxanna informed him bluntly as she turned her attention back to her own martini. “The one where you caught yourself being a dick to your family in your mind again.”

“Yeah,” Connor sighed, pushing his beer away. Maybe she’d let him get away with just not drinking. Of course when he looked at her out of the corner of his eye he saw the curiously raised eyebrow and knew it wasn’t going to fly. So he pulled the thing back and took another sip, trying not to grimace at the taste. “I love them, I really do. And they’re good people. It’s just…”

“They planned your life out for you, and weren’t happy when you didn’t fit into the mold?” Roxanna provided. “Yeah, I get that, Connor. You know I do. My dad wanted me to be a mechanic, remember?”

Despite himself, Connor had to wince. Always did when Roxanna brought it up. It wasn’t that he thought the work was below or beyond her if she put her mind to it. Rather he knew how terrible Roxanna was with cars in any and all forms, how the one time she’d adjusted the radio in his car she’d managed to somehow break the tuner as if by magic. Potentially putting someone’s life in her hands based on her ability to change a tire or brake pads was actually scary. 

“Yeah, I know,” he agrees, finishing off his beer with one last swig. “I just… I wish they’d be happy that I might have finally gotten this right, not because what it will bring the company, but because I achieved something I’ve been working so hard on.”

“I’m certain they’re proud of you anyway,” Roxanna answered, patting him on the back. “Come on, let’s get going. And don’t you take that insane credit card out, okay? This was our celebration, and I’m paying.”

Connor scoffed at that. “You’re only doing it because my drink was fucking cheap pisswater this time.”

Roxanna grinned at that. “Yeah. Maybe. Now come on, let’s get you back home before your mother gets mad that we missed dinner.”

Right. Family dinner. Connor didn’t swear under his breath, even though he wanted to. Because it didn’t matter what he’d done in the lab today. The first thing his parents were going to talk about was the tabloid he’d managed to get his face plastered onto the cover of. They were going to have to yell at him about public image and not dating those ‘distasteful types that caught themselves improperly in the public eye’ and such. After all, it was totally reasonable to blame him for accidentally dating a porn star. Not like the guy had come up to Connor and said ‘hey I’m a porn star, wanna get a drink?’ And the whole section of the article that claimed he was trying to steal the company from under his sister’s feet was such bullshit that it made him sick. But it was going to be the talk of the dinner table long before a critical advancement in security systems that he had created ever would be. Of course. That was just his luck.


	2. Second Lock

Turned out there was another kind of silence. One that came when the world had gone crazy, when there had been too much noise, too much light, too much flash and bang. A silence that came after the crackling roar of flames, the piercing scream of sirens demanding to be heard, and the sorts of sobs that tore through the chest so deep that they left a whole body aching like running a marathon up the side of a mountain. It was the silence that came after the put you in a sound-proof room after the sensory overstimulation of everything else that had come, and the bright white walls seared eyes and the smell of coffee and honest to god paper assaulted the nose and the chill in the air made every breath burn. A special kind of silence that Connor had never even fathomed until he was staring up at the police detective in shock, his hands chained to the table and his voice raw from his sobs, and the declaration delivered. 

“You… what?” Connor rasped out as he stared up at Detective Tyrone Lambert of the homicide division. The words tasted like ash in his mouth, a taste he was far too familiar with now, even if he couldn’t remember the details of why. His eyes moved down to his wrist though, to his left hand bundled in gauze. He remembered why, knew the burn that was under it. A part of his mind whispered the reason. 

The door to his sister’s bedroom with an antique metal doorknob, it’s pattern now burned into his skin. All the safety videos said to test doorknobs before opening doors. If it was too hot to handle then it wasn’t safe to open. Never touch with your bare hand, the videos said as well. Back of the hand, because there were too many fragile nerves in the fingers and palm. Back of the hand, or with a cloth wrapped around your hand, and even then… 

“I said we found your other bank account, Mr. Danvers. And, of course, I have to wonder why a well established young man such as yourself needs to set up a secret account in Caspian’s notoriously hard to trace financial system, filled with half a million dollars. Tell me, Danvers, where did you get the money, and was half a million the going price?”

Connor blinked, shook his head, tried to figure out what the fuck was going on here. What secret account? Half a million dollars? An account in Caspian? What in the world was…?

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he answered, his voice weak, and then the folder in the man’s hand was thumped down onto the table in front of him. He was left staring at paper records for a bank account in his name. Money transferred in from an account number that he recognized and it made him sick. Money transferred back out just a few hours later. 

“Why did you have your family killed, Danvers?”

All he could do was stare in shock. They thought… 

“That fire almost killed me too,” Connor protested, his throat tight. Dead? All of them? He… he’d figured Claudia. Her doorknob was so hot and she’d gone up to bed before him after dinner. After Roxanna had gone home she’d just fled to her room, probably off to work on her model building hobby like she did at night. Said it soothed her mind after all the stresses of the day. Connor understood that just as well as anyone. When he was alone at night he’d play with holo-puzzles, keep his mind sharp. Toy with the latest locks the company had, or older archived ones, see if he could crack them himself. He was getting good, and it was a nice, calming thing to do at night while still letting him work without really, you know, working. But his parents’ room was in another part of the house. The fire had kept him from getting to them, but he’d gotten out. Struggled with the paramedics on scene as they tried to heave him into an ambulance. Hadn’t calmed down until he saw his mother being put into another rig, her eyes open just a little bit. 

Last he’d known, an hour ago, before he’d been put into this box, she was alive. Fighting, breathing, living and now… 

“Is my mother…?” 

The look Detective Lambert gave him had no speck of pity in it. But why would it when the man thought, for some reason, that Connor had his family killed? That he’d had his home burned to kill everyone in it? The very thought made Connor sick, and he had to swallow back his nausea, blink back his tears, and struggle to breathe through his nose, even though all he could smell now was the smoke. All he could hear was the scream of smoke alarms and terror or sirens and the horrid crackling roar of the fire itself. That was all there was, and all there would ever be again. 

“I was in that fire,” he plead again, finally looking up at the detective. “And I loved my family. I would never…”

“Then why were funds transferred out of your division of DSS, in your name, to pay for an Adaptive based mercenary known by the name of The Pyro? We have surveillance footage of the man sabotaging exits, placing accelerants to keep people from exiting through windows, and even a cocky little image of the helmeted man saluting security cameras.”

“Then he’s who you should be after!” Connor shouted, his throat screaming in pain as he did so. The smoke had hurt him, badly, and while the doctors said he’d make a full recovery with time, that didn’t mean he was ready for this stress. “Please, this man must have killed…”

“He did,” the detective confirmed. “But your windows were untampered with, Connor. We found a wedge in your sister’s door, holding it closed. She wouldn’t have been able to open it from the inside. And there is the fact that fire in no way barred you from any exits to your room. Tell me what you think that looks like, kid.”

It looked like… He didn’t want to think what it looked like. So Connor just hung his head. They’d figure it out sooner or later. He had no reason to kill his family. No motive at all. And surely just a little poking would reveal this wasn’t his bank account, that he hadn’t transferred R&D funds to take down his family. He loved them. He was innocent. This couldn’t be happening…

“True or false, Mr. Danvers, you are now the sole heir to your family’s company.”

Oh. Motive. Connor paled at the very idea of it, and when he looked up again he knew he had hate in his eyes from the way the detective smiled at him. The man thought he’d hit a nerve, that he’d found some weakness to exploit. 

“I couldn’t give a damn about the money, Detective Lambert. No amount of money in the world can bring my family back to me.”

This made the man snort, and Connor opened his mouth to continue when there was a knock on the door. The detective cursed under his breath as they both looked to the door, and Connor found a head peeking in through the barely cracked door. 

“Uh, sir…” an officer in a regular uniform said as he moved forward more. “The captain would like to see you.”

“I’m in the middle of something right now,” the detective countered, no end to the disdain in his voice. 

“Yeah, but the captain wants you now, and besides, the guy’s lawyer just showed up so…”

Detective Lambert huffed a sigh of disapproval and moved to the door, shaking his head as he went. Connor almost thought he could hear the man mumbling under his breath, but he couldn’t be sure. After all, his ears were full of the sounds of fire and sirens and screaming alarms. Again his eyes fell to the table he was chained to, and he didn’t even look up as he heard feet come closer. 

“Connor?”

The voice was more familiar now, and when he glanced at the plain clothes, he found that face was one he almost remembered. A guy he’d gone to highschool with, the name that went with it was perhaps Roger? 

“Hey Rog,” he sighed, his voice still a whisper, far too tired to raise it anymore. 

“Did you do it?”

Connor looked up to him, confused. 

“Did you kill you family?”

How did he put the denial into words that people would believe. So he just shook his head. 

The jingle of keys shocked him, which made Connor’s eyes go wide. 

“What…?” he started to ask, and then the cuffs were being unlocked. 

“Don’t ask, just hurry up. We’re getting you out of here.”

* * * * * *

“What’s going on?” Connor asked as he was rushed into the back of the cliche black van. The question seemed far more important with the fact that Dr. Gonzales was behind the wheel. Roxanna sat beside him, and even as he spoke, there was a small bag of things being thrown at him. 

“We’re getting you to the spaceport,” Dr. Gonzales answered. 

“Problem, they think I killed my family,” Connor sighed, shaking his head. 

“Yeah, it’s on the news,” Roxanna responded, her voice a whisper, and it sounded so damn dead. Which made sense. She’d lost a lot too. That didn’t mean he wasn’t angry to hear her so grieved. That wasn’t her family. She wasn’t being blamed for… “The goal is to get you off the planet. Because whoever did this…”

“They stole a large portion of the R&D budget, Connor,” Dr. Gonzales interrupted. “When I told the interim president about it…”

“It came back to me,” Connor deadpanned. “God, I feel like I’m being framed here.”

“You are,” Roxanna told him simply. “None of us believe you did this, but no one here is really going to get that. And so the only thing we can do is get you off planet to safety. We’ll send for you once we’ve got this cleared up. No one is ever going to get justice if they’re obsessed with you. And Claudia deserves justice.”

Connor just leaned against the side of the van. He didn’t have the heart to say that if someone had gone to this sort of effort to frame him, there might not be a coming back. And there definitely wouldn’t be anything like justice. All of that assumed, as well, that he even got off of this planet. How could they all risk so much over someone like him?


	3. Third Lock

Time, he had heard it said, healed all wounds. It was a nice sentiment, really. The idea that with time any pain one had experienced would fade. The distance between one and an event would make said event more bearable. Yet here the man once known as Connor Danvers was, almost half a year after the incident, with no relief in sight. His rare contact with the people he had left behind held no hopeful tidbits. In fact, his absence from his home had only seemed to solidify the police’s case against him. And had given whoever had set him up even more of a chance to make their frame job believable. Six months and the burn on the back of his hand still ached in the worst way, and every time he took off his gloves and saw it he wanted to scream for how unfair the world was. 

Six months and still Connor Danvers was buried somewhere out in the infinitely cold and silent void of space, and a young man who had come to be known as Miles had taken his place. Stepped into his skin, stole his voice, and moved his body from day to day, while Connor could do nothing but remember and linger in the loss. 

At least Miles knew how to move. At least Miles knew how to make use of everything Connor had learned, everything Connor had created, to survive. Connor was a rich idealist. Miles was a man surviving on the streets of one of the most dangerous planets Humanity had chosen to colonize. A backwards little shit hole where the weather itself was deadly not because of gale force winds or violent lightning storms or thick falls of snow, but because of the very clouds themselves. The way the moisture in the air stung and burned skin, melted eyes, burned brains or whatever else it was supposed to do. Miles knew how to survive, how to keep going, how to get what he needed. Connor was still paralyzed with grief, and so easily set aside by the thief Miles that it was almost scary. 

Almost made him wonder just how sane he was. 

Of course those sorts of thoughts weren’t really suited to the man ducked just inside of the alcove of a doorway at nearly three in the morning. It was early, sure, but these were the hours that Miles thrived in. Those times after the world had gone to sleep, and only the most questionable people walked the streets. Innocent people weren’t hurt at three in the morning, or so Connor let himself believe. No, whatever Miles would do would only hit insurance companies, so what should he care? Let their deep pockets provide for him in a way that the rest of the world thought beneath itself. 

Miles took a deep breath as he pulled on his pair of synthsense gloves. All the concerns of Connor had to be gone now, thanks brain, because the job was here and now. Well, job was probably a generous term. What this was, flat out, was a minor heist. A jewelry store he had noticed had sub-par security systems in about seventy percent of the ways that it mattered, and in the other thirty percent, there was a brand spanking new DSS-J32-B lock installed. The encrypted system was one of the newest DSS offerings, and damn secure against most methods of invasion. Unless, of course, you knew the little secrets to taking them out that DSS had never revealed to the public because it seemed too convoluted for anyone to ever come up with. 

He, of course, wasn’t just anyone. 

A light tap of a button on the back of his left glove activated the interaction between the gloves and the OS of his helmet, and Miles smirked as a variety of displays he’d taken the time to fine tune on the coding level came to life. Power readings on the lock’s data entry panel by the door popped up next to his schematics of the wiring systems of the lock. In a corner was his layout of the store, all the pieces he intended to take already marked off to help him do the run more efficiently. out of the store, all the pieces he intended to take already marked off to help him do the run more efficiently. Not that efficiency was too important. What he got away with he got away with, because the fence he’d gotten to know had never seemed to hesitate to take whatever Miles could get him, whether it was high quality or not. 

Good thing, Miles supposed as he cracked his knuckles, pulled out a pair of pliers and a length of mostly stripped wire, and set the timer running. The last thing he needed was to argue over someone because they thought he was some idiot who knew nothing about jewelry quality and gem ratings. 

The pliers had the cover off of the access panel in a wink, and from there Miles just had to carefully root through the systems. If he didn’t get the system disabled or the cover back on within thirty seconds then the alarms would be going and that would bring the police down on him. Which, he supposed, was why the company hadn’t worked too hard on this minor hole in the system. Someone would have to figure it out and pull it off in less than a minute and what were the chances of that? 

Well, seeing as this was the second place Miles was hitting tonight, pretty damn high. He allowed himself a minor chuckle as he isolated the wire that led to a secondary, internal battery that would keep the system going even in a power outage. Step one, check. Step two had him quickly stripping the insulation off of the feed from the main power. Step three, connect the wires to short out both. The great thing was that it burned the backup first, which left the active going off as well, and a small, holographic alert that something was wrong with the system flickering for half a second in front of his eyes before the whole thing died. 

First security system foiled. Miles grinned and snapped the face plate back on and put the tools away. Instead he pulled forth a few smaller pieces, traditional lockpicks. Thank god he’d learned to use these as a kid as part of the inherent familiarizing himself with the history of locks. Airlocks were an easy enough thing to get into once a security system was shorted. They were supposed to be, considering people had to duck into them frequently, and during a storm the store owners preferred to have customers in their shop rather than out of it. Granted there were special lockdown procedures that were far harder to get through when there was an actual storm, but outside of one most airlocks had a physical key setup that unlocked the outer door for business settings. It took only a moment to pop that so that he could pull the airlock door open and slip into that. 

Now came, ironically, the true hard part. Miles knew the actual security systems way better than the tech behind airlocks, their sensors, and things such as that. Even as he closed the door behind him and the system started to filter the air and set to equalizing to the internal atmosphere, he was pulling a third set of tools altogether out. These were the ones that were needed to hack the airlock itself, which brought up its own problems. Still, his study of them since landing on this planet and realizing that he sort of lacked the identity for a normal job, had paid off. This one took a few more minutes to get through, as well as several pretty impressive bits of active code alteration through power surges in the wiring as well as a good old fashioned cursing and kicking a power panel which just magically made everything obey him. But like that he was opening the inner door and damn, jewelry store open. 

“World is your fucking oyster,” Miles chuckled under his breath, certain the noise didn’t escape his helmet. There was still the internal security systems to deal with, but compared to the external stuff, he wasn’t worried at all. Because the poor owner hadn’t thought how bad of an idea it might be to tell his fifteen year old son the code, and the kid had bragged to friends and Miles had managed to hear the kids as they were walking out of the store one day, their voices at a hush. 

Triumphantly he punched the code into the display by the door and then he took his duffle over to the first case. Time to load up. 

Miles was halfway through the first case, one filled with expensive watches set with lovely jewels because people on Adaptive liked even gaudier jewelry than he’d ever dealt with back home, probably due to the whole helmet thing, when the alarm went off. 

“Or maybe the kid was bragging about the lockdown code,” he cursed under his breath. The timer on his helmet kept track as he smashed another case open and quickly threw a whole display of watches of a variety of qualities into his bag. 

Less than impressive amount of loot gained, Miles threw himself to the slowly closing airlock door. Good thing for him that his tampering with the airlock and external security systems meant that the traditional quick and complete lockdown wasn’t going to be put into play here. In fact, he wanted to smirk as he pulled the inner airlock door closed behind him and kicked the power access panel once more. Just for spite. Another quick bit of wiring had the external door opening despite the air processing not finishing, and just like that Miles was back out onto the street. 

Not that the streets were much better than being in the store itself. There were sirens closing in on his location and there was nothing good to come from them. If the cops got to him they’d fingerprint him, and if they did that then of course they would get the warrant for him that had no doubt put up on the Interstellar databases. That would get him sent back home, life in prison if he was lucky, and put him in reach of those people who had sought to bring his family down and that had set up some bullshit board of directors in their place that seemed intent on destroying everything Connor had ever believed in. The very thought of it all terrified Connor. So close to it all being for nothing. 

Miles, though, stripped his synthsense gloves off, shoved them into a pocket, and ran into the alley between the jewelry store and the bookstore next to it. Unlike Connor, he had a fucking exit plan, and it wasn’t going to be thrown off just because of some sounds in the distance. Instead he took a running start at a dumpster, vaulted on to it, and kept running just far enough to throw himself into the air and grab the bottom rung of the bookstore’s fire escape. His weight disengaged the lock and as the thing rolled down he jumped off, slinging the duffle onto his back. Once the ladder was down he was ascending quickly, pausing just long enough to get the ladder back up and locked. Then it was a sprint up spiralling stairs and onto the rooftop. From there he looked toward the nearest buildings, looked for the likeliest jump, and running at full speed, threw himself across the gap between buildings not once, but three times until he was a bit away from the scene of the crime. 

Finally deciding that his distance was more than enough for the less than impressive police force of the city of Gulch, Miles ducked down behind the wall of the roof he had taken refuge on and grinned to himself. He’d give it a few minutes to catch his breath before he took to putting more distance between himself and his crimes before doubling back to his fence.

Miles had accounted for everything, and now he was away with a bag filled with his first store’s take, and supplemented with some of what he had taken from the second. With all of this he should be good for a few months, maybe even get a more secure residence and start building some of the gear he would need for more complicated locks. After all, someone on this planet had done the job against his family, and if he could just find them, he might be able to find the hand behind it all. That was all he wanted. True justice for the people he had loved. 

What he got instead was a gun in his face from a woman in gray and ochre, and two more men behind her looking menacing. 

“What have we got here?” the woman asked. “A little cat’s paw accidentally falling into our hands? Hand over the bag, thief.”

Well fuck. Why couldn’t things just go right?


	4. Fourth Lock

Somehow, in all the time he’d lived on Adaptive, Miles hadn’t really gotten his head around just what he was looking for out here. Apparently the theory that he was looking for a mercenary among some small handful of them on the planet had been… way past faulty. What he was looking for was a needle in a haystack, truth be told, and that was almost scarier to his inner Connor than the fact that his inner Connor had become that. Miles was just becoming so much easier, so much more hardy, and definitely more attached to life on this planet than Connor had ever expected. 

“York, are you paying attention or not?” 

Miles looked up from the crossword puzzle book he’d propped up on his chest. When he’d first draped himself over his favorite armchair he’d actually had intentions on it, but then Madrid, Jakarta and Berlin had come in, flopping over the worn down couch with beers in hand and their intentions clearly on some televised sporting event. Given the fact that it was apparently roller derby season and the trio who did merc work every few nights were actually in an amateur league themselves. They would watch every game they could catch live, ponder over the ones they recorded while the four of them were out on jobs, and argued over techniques, gear, and tactics at every meal. Frankly, Miles was almost as tired of the damn idea of the sport as he was of the name they’d given him that night two months ago on the rooftop. 

They’d given him more than that, of course. It had been Jakarta, the leader of their little team, who had taken his duffle and tossed it at Berlin, the ‘team heavy.’ The man, loaded up with an honest to god rocket launcher, had pawed through it and shown his compatriots the haul Miles had made that night. And Jakarta, intrigued, had started the questioning. She’d laughed off his question as to whether they knew ‘The Pyro,’ noting there had to be at least two mercs by that designation in Gulch alone, not to mention the other city states. And just like that, he’d learned that the mercenary business was alive and thriving in the city of Gulch. Hell, on the planet of Adaptive. It was almost a more legitimate line of work than signing up with the UNSC military branches. 

Good thing for him they had seen a lot of use in a talented jewel thief being added to the combined skills of their group. Otherwise they could have taken his haul and left him dead behind them. Instead he had a roof over his head that didn’t leak, a secure door, a bed he shared with Jakarta, and three squares a day. 

Truth be told, there was actually enough good to this deal, including the merc work and Madrid’s promise to get in touch with his contacts to see if they couldn’t find this ‘Pyro’ that had killed his family, to make the roller derby debate worth it. 

“You’ve got your so-called sport on, so you can bet not,” he returned easily to his boss slash lover, the only woman in their group, who was stretched out across the laps of their other teammates. Jakarta was a lovely woman, with skin dark as the night, brilliant green eyes, and the broad nose and full lips that were considered the height of beauty back on Miles’s home world. The first time she’d taken off her helmet he’d definitely been caught staring and Madrid and Berlin had just shrugged to each other. Apparently the woman enjoying the company of her teammates was far from uncommon, and they had no problem sharing the time she so graciously gave them all. 

“Yeah, well it’s a replay of a championship game from last year, and it’s just background noise for our planning for tomorrow.”

Miles actually winced in pain when his sudden motion to sit up found him slamming his heel into the bit of wood exposed just under the left arm of the chair he was in. But that was easily waved away as he sat up straighter and twisted so he could look. Sure enough Madrid was pushing things aside on the coffee table to roll out a set of blueprints. Blueprints meant B&E jobs, and Miles liked those over anything else they’d done since he’d been so kindly ‘asked’ to join the group. Sure, he’d been taught to handle the guns the group used for more hands on jobs, but when there was a B&E of any sort he was left mainly in charge of getting them in and out, and the need to kill was a bit less pressing. 

Not that he couldn’t. 

He’d learned a lot from these people, and they were kdkills Miles knew he needed to keep going on Adaptive. Especially now that he was a certified merc thanks to his new friends. Choosing not to live by the gun just meant it was far more likely you’d die by it. And Miles wasn’t going down until he had his justice. His vengeance. His truth. 

“About fucking time. I was starting to get bored with you guys working on your damn uniforms.”

“Dude, off-season is about to end,” Madrid snapped in response. “Trust me, York, sooner or later we’re going to get your quick fucking feet on our side, and you’re going to love the rush of it all.”

“The rush I get off of, Madrid, is racing the timer for infiltration, so let’s get to it,” Miles smiled, slipping out of his seat to position himself on the floor and thus closer to the map. Work always made life easier, and fuck if this job wasn’t satisfying in its own way. 

“It’s not going to be easy,” Jakarta said. “We’re going in for an information grab, and a smash up after. The problem? This place has seriously beefed up security and a brand new class of DSS security systems. Think you can handle it, York?”

He grinned up at his partners, eyes flashing with pleasure. Nothing better than being a stick in the craw of the new management of DSS. “There isn’t anything that company can make that will ever hold me back. Simple as that.”

* * * * * *

“So, York, can you handle it?”

His synthsense gloved fingers hovered just in front of the holographic display of the lock. Sure enough it was a newer offering by DSS, and it was nothing like the encrypted locks already offered on the market. It was more complex, in a way that had a strangely alluring elegance to the form. Yet there was something about the specific formation of it that was nagging at him, that put Miles on edge and had his fingers shaking just the littlest bit. Which was troublesome, because with a new lock and a time limit in which to explore it, he had to do this whole thing by touch. The slightest little shiver could set the thing off, which would bring guards down upon them rather than toward the distraction that Jakarta and Berlin were running near another entrance. Getting inside of the minor corporate research building where this Lethbridge Industries was working on a new, military grade helmet modification unit that would fetch a hefty price on the open market was one thing. Getting into the R&D room where the schematics and other things they intended to get away with was another thing entirely. It was this door they had to get through to get the prize. 

Except there was something about this lock…?

“York? We’re sorta on a timer here…”

“I’ve got it, Madrid,” Miles insisted, flexing his fingers before setting them into the control points of the locks and letting the synthsense gloves tell him where and what he was doing even as the interface nodes on the gloves returned information on pressure, temperature, and other little details to the feedback mod displayed on his visor. And wow did this lock do it all. It read the slightest touch of his fingers for motion, picked up on their temperature and spread it through the system, and the slightest flex of his fingers showed that the lock was a series of nested interlocking rings. 

 

“Whoever designed this,” he whispered in awe as he started to twist his way through the first level, “is a genius.”

The thing was… Miles had a pretty serious theory as to who the genius was. 

“Yeah, and the genius is between us and the goods, and trust me, this employer of ours is not someone you disappoint,” Madrid sighed. “Can you do it?”

“Yeah,” Miles assured him, his confidence swelling up as the lock moved easily in a pattern he remembered from out of the shadows of his past. No one had ever figured they would be putting him on the opposite side of it. There was no way any degree of customization in the lock would ever keep the man who had once been Connor Danvers from getting through his own damn lock. “No problem at all.”

“Yeah right. You’re good, York, but even you can’t beat a new DSS system in less than…”

The first ring gave way and let Miles’s fingers slide into the second ring that with a careful twist and flick allowed him to return to the first level to get at the next pin. That seemed to silence Madrid for a moment, because there wasn’t another peep for the rest of the ten seconds it took to get Miles through another pin and then sink down into the third level to present his discovered frequency combination to the system’s review. 

“Damn,” Madrid whispered, and Miles could hear the pleasure in his friend’s voice. “I stand corrected York. You’re a fucking miracle worker.”

“I prefer the term genius,” Miles answered as he pulled his hands from the lock and the door opened. He stood and strode easily into the room. “Come on. This employer of ours really wants the info, right? I’ll check the computer archives, you get the physical stuff, okay?”

He didn’t wait for confirmation, just moved into the R&D lab and glanced around. It took only a second for him to figure out which would be the work station of the person in charge of the lab. Their info said the man was a grandparent, and there was only one workstation with a picture of three generations of family on the desk, with all other workstations oriented to be easily seen from it. Miles flopped down into the desk chair and booted up the computer system, thrusting in the thumbdrive the employer had given them that would crack the security systems and download the information they were looking for. This was the easy part of the job. Already Miles had taken care of his big parts in the job, and while he waited for the automated program to run its course, he could spare a moment to think. 

Or at least to acknowledge the way Connor was raging deep in his gut, a furious hatred burning in his chest. How could Dr. Gonzales have let them use his work, turn it into the new tool for the now evil overlords of his grandfather’s business? Of course being a fugitive on the run, suspected of murdering his own family and being too much of a failure to hide it, it wasn’t like the thing he had created was safe. It belonged to Danvers Security Systems anyway, and who was he to complain about it? If nothing else it was going to get them a lot of work until DSS could do an analysis of at least ten instances of him cracking this system to find the loophole they apparently hadn’t fixed during a proper QA process. He was going to be set for a while and that was useful for him and his team and would get them good money so he could…

One of the files being transferred over onto the drive caught his eye on the screen. Just the briefest flash of a name, and it sent chills into him. Made the burning of Connor jump higher. But the name was gone just as quickly as it had come, and with the system already occupied, all Miles could do was push the wheeled chair over to another workstation. 

“Almost done here,” Madrid called from another part of the room, and Miles ignored the words as he booted up this computer as well. Maybe he wasn’t the best hacker but he thought he could get into this system and to that file he had briefly seen. A file with the DSS corporate locator as the origin point, and Dr. Gonzales’s name on it. “York? Dude, we’ve got to get moving soon, do you really need another terminal?”

“Yes,” Miles snapped. “Monitor that one and grab the drive when it’s done. Then move. I’ll be just behind you.”

He wasn’t sure that he would be, but at least Madrid didn’t argue as Miles’s fingers flew over the keyboard. Dammit there were walls everywhere he looked, and it didn’t matter how deep he got, there was always something blocking his route. 

“York, two minutes let until we’ve got to move,” Madrid informed him. 

“Bit busy here, Drid. So please shut up.”

Then, a few moments later, “A minute, York.”

Miles scooped up the paper weight from the desk and hurled it at his friend’s head. “Shut up.”

There was a tsking noise as Miles finally got through the last security barrier and pulled a spare datachip from the back of his helmet to feed it into the computer. Wouldn’t be too bad to copy this and a few more files for himself. But as the transfer went down he still had to watch. See that name, his mentor, the man he believed in the most, claiming credit for the design of Miles’s lock. See him named as a recent promotion to the head of R&D. Like that it all started to fit together didn’t it? Not that it was enough proof, or even a reason, but Connor thought he’d be sick in his stomach. 

“We’ve got to go, York!” Madrid insisted, coming up and yanking Miles’s chair away from the desk. “Everyone else is expecting us.”

Miles cursed, grabbed his own datachip, and stored it back in his helmet. As he pushed to his feet to join Madrid in his break toward the door, something clattered loudly behind them. Instinct got York down behind a desk as a shot rang out in the room, and when he looked to see if Madrid had made it to safety, he instead found his gray and navy clad friend falling, face first, to the ground. 

“What a shame,” a voice sighed in the back of the room, from where the clattering sound had come from. “You know, if you’d just left when he told you, I wouldn’t have had to do that. But you’re already cutting my window so small, and I’ve got to say, your little time is a lot less skilled than I’d been paying for. I’m starting to think the money wasn’t worth it at all. So sorry. Business and all of that.”

Miles peeked over the top of the desk he was sheltering behind, and found a man in a rich shade of blue with what looked like grenades string across his chest and waist, and an honest to god cape on his back. What the gold thing on his shoulder was, Miles didn’t have the slightest clue, but he could tell just by looking at the man that he’d gotten himself into some pretty serious trouble. 

“So, York was it? What a lovely name. But no matter. Go to your friend and bring me his datachip and yours, and I might just let you carry him out of here. I only shot him in the shoulder. Consider his life your payment for all of this.”

Miles looked to Madrid, the spreading bit of blood on the floor, and considered the datachip in his helmet. The one that might give him the proof he needed. 

With a sigh he pulled his shotgun from his back and forced himself to breathe evenly. 

“Sorry, Madrid. But I can’t. I’m so sorry.”

Weapon in hand, Connor Danvers, known as Miles, York, or simply ‘the Thief’, stood and faced the man who had shot down his partner. 

He refused to give this up. Not when he finally had a lead. 

“If I die, the datachip automatically wipes. In fact, that failsafe is built into both of our helmets. And I’ve got a feeling you had to have put something dangerous onto the datachips if you’re demanding to have ours rather than doing the info grab yourself. What, the systems here going to format themselves? That means we’re your only chance at learning what you want, right?”

The man in blue tilted his head as if intrigued, and Miles had to hope that would be enough.


	5. Fifth Lock

Spunky. 

That was what the blue clad man had called him, and half an hour later as Miles stood in an abandoned warehouse with his team and the man who had shot Madrid in the back, he had to wonder about the word. Clearly the man had taken Miles’s bluff seriously, and had even been so kind as to carry Madrid the whole way out of the complex. Granted the concern and conflict in the group had settled down when the man had introduced himself as ‘The Informant.’ Seriously, Miles had heard the capital letters when the man spoke, and saw it in the rigid spines and conflicted fury of his teammates. 

Which had led them here, to a burner regroup point, where said ‘Informant’ had Madrid on his stomach on top of a load of crates, his shirt cut open, humming happily as he sewed up the wound he had just pulled his own damn bullet out from. 

“What the hell is going on here?” Jakarta hissed at Miles as the man worked. 

“There is no fucking point in asking me,” he returned to her. “I did what I could to get us out of there alive, but other than that, you’re the one that lined up the job. It isn’t my job to understand the whys or the hows, and I’m apparently the only one here who doesn’t know who this guy is supposed to be.”

“Well, underneath all of the smiles and kind words, he’s one of the leading infobroker mercs on the world, and probably the top one in Gulch, period,” Berlin provided, and for all that Jakarta and Miles were trying to be quiet, Berlin didn’t seem to have a problem with being heard at all. 

“What a fine compliment to pay me,” the Informant answered as he snipped off a piece of thread he was using to patch the unconscious Madrid up. “There, your friend should be right as rain soon enough. Now can I have my information?”

“How about you start by explaining why you decided to show up and blow the op you apparently paid us to do?” Berlin demanded, and the man simply pulled a towel from somewhere and started to clean Madrid’s blood from his hands. 

“The answer, my dear D ranks, was that I actually didn’t expect you to make it into the R&D lab,” Informant shrugged as he finished, his voice cheerful and happy as he thrust the towel with their friend’s blood on it back into wherever it had come from. “The new DSS lock system is so fresh that I didn’t expect anyone to make it through it. It was my hope that your infiltration man would trigger alarms on one side of the door. The lockdown procedures and alarms would cover up me triggering them from the vents, so I could slip in and get the information myself. Then, when you probably gave up your ruckus would give me a distraction to get away during.”

“And what was your plan if we made it in there first?” Miles demanded. “You know, like we did?”

“Oh, well, I had to account for that chance, so the data drive I gave you was going to do exactly what mine would, especially if they were found on you if you died. See, all bases covered.”

“Fucker,” Jakarta spat at him. “I should report you to the IFF, you son of a bitch.”

There was something to the way the man’s head tilted, to the slight seam in his visor that, when the light caught the reflective material, made the whole helmet look like it was frowning in disapproval. It sent the worst shiver down Miles’s back. 

“Oh, if you do that, my dear, I might have to inform them that your York’s application into the mercenary registrations was under duress. What was it you told him? He worked for you or he died there on the spot?”

Miles looked to his partners, and he was pretty certain he’d never seen Berlin so still in the whole time they’d known each other. The thing was, what the man said was frightfully accurate. That was what Jakarta had done when they’d met, and he didn’t see how the man could know it. Or why the fixers would even care. 

“They’d have you blackballed, you know,” Informant continued easily. “I doubt any of you would want to go without the income. Their opinions on registration under duress are very set, are they not? And the punishments swift and righteous. I hear the last group that tried it had the Soldier sicked on them by the IFF’s personal sanction. The one before that had the Captain. Neither seems like a very good choice, even if your companion has since changed his mind and embraced the life. Rules are rules, Jakarta.”

The stiffness in the normally confident woman’s shoulders gave Miles pause. Apparently the threat wasn’t so empty. And that… was far from comforting. 

“Don’t I get a say in this?” Miles protested. 

“Not at all my boy,” Informant laughed. “Now, I will transfer the money over to you all, as you did complete the job I hired you for. I would, though, request my data now.”

“Not until we’ve got the money and we’re away from you,” Jakarta countered. “We’ll stick to the originally agreed upon deaddrop or nothing. Got it?”

The strange mercenary’s hands came up before him, almost defensively. “Now now, no need to get so aggressive. Yes, we’ll stick to that plan. In fact, I’m happy to let you and your team leave first. Except for York. I feel like he should be made properly aware of his decisions in our line of work. Workable?”

“There is no way we’re leaving a member of our team behind for you to…” Berlin started, and Miles stood, ready to cut his friend off.

“It’s okay,” he said softly, bringing everyone there to a standstill. “It’s okay, Jakarta. I’ll be fine. Just take Madrid and get out of here, okay?”

When it looked like she was going to protest, he moved forward to meet the Informant. “Let’s go talk then.”

No one said anything as he walked off to another corner of the empty assembly line floor. Good. Because right now he didn’t know what he wanted to say at all. Just that he knew that when he handed over his datachip he was going to lose every chance he had, and he had to figure out how to make Informant let him keep the thing. 

* * * * * *

“You know,” Informant said about ten minutes later after Miles had seen his friends all slip out through another exit, Madrid in Berlin’s arms, “I have to wonder at how easily you got through that lock tonight.”

“Wasn’t easy,” Miles said dismissively. “And if you want to know how I did it, you’re going to have to give me some very serious pay, because I’m not sharing a secret that is going to get me a hell of a lot more jobs if I can help it.”

“I know, it would put you out of the business,” Informant waved off, chuckling to himself. “But you see, I have a theory, would you care to hear it?”

Miles shrugged and played with his personal datachip between his fingers. 

“The original designer of the lock is missing you see.”

The fact that Miles didn’t drop the chip then and there was a definite credit for how deft his fingers were. That didn’t stop his jaw from dropping in his helmet, or the way his attention had literally snapped to the information broker.

“You mean Dr. Gonzales, their R&D guy? Last I heard he was still…” Miles said quickly, trying to brush aside his flub. 

“No, I mean Connor Danvers,” the man chuckled, shaking his head. “But you knew that already, didn’t you? So now I’ve got to wonder whether he sold you the schematics when he fled his homeworld, accused of killing his family, or if…”

The words trailed off into a weighty sort of silence that made Miles’s shoulders sag with the pressure of it. Something told him that trying to deflect would get him nowhere. 

“The bounty isn’t worth turning me over,” he said defensively, but the resigned fatigue in his voice wasn’t that of Miles, but of Connor caught in a corner. Strange, he hadn’t felt so tired before this. And to think he’d been so close to finding the answers he always wanted. “I didn’t do it…”

“I know.”

There was no question in the tone, no room for argument, just a simple, absolute statement of what the man was and wasn’t aware of. There was such conviction in the two words that Connor looked back up at the man and just stared for a long moment. 

“You know?” he whispered, shocked. 

“I know,” Informant repeated. “You see, Thief, I’m an information guy. And I know that the contract was offered first to the Captain. They’re one of that special group of assassins based on Adaptive that seems to delight on interspersing their on planet work with off-planet contracts. When they turned it down it was spread out to a few other possible sources.”

“How does that make you certain that I’m innocent?” Connor demanded, leaning forward. “If you have any proof… my family… they were murdered and I just want to see justice done and…”

“Slow down,” Informant insisted. “I know because I put what I knew of the offer to the Captain with what happened to the Danvers. It’s my job to put two and two together, kid. And there was no way someone smart enough to manage to get in touch with the Captain was going to use so easily traced of an account. Captain would never accept it.”

“They didn’t, by your own words,” Connor snapped. 

“Yeah, but I have an advantage in knowing why they didn’t. See, I know for sure they didn’t because I had another job to handle in that timeframe.”

Connor’s hands went limply to his sides. Here he was, facing a man who had been asked to kill his family, and probably to frame him in the process. A man that his partners had apparently been terrified by the prospect of the name of, maybe had even known him for who he was. And the man was… telling him all of that? Why? 

“The chip you don’t want to give up… you figure there is something on it that will lead you to the person who did it, right?” Informant asked. 

“Yeah… it does,” Connor said softly. “What’s it to you?”

The way the man tilted his head had to be a smile, but Connor couldn’t be certain. 

“I don’t mind having someone who is so familiar with the newest DSS lock systems, who in fact created them, indebted to me,” Informant admitted simply. “If I let you keep that, will you teach me how to get through or at least around the new system?”

Connor clenched the chip in his hand, and at last shook his head. “No, I can’t do that.”

“Connor, kid, just be reas…”

“If you help me figure out who did my family in, then I’ll teach you, hell I’ll be your personal lock pick on demand,” Connor offered instead, stepping forward. “Can you do that?”

This time the silence was a pensive one, the kind that would crawl through the skin and make your nerves sing with tension if you weren’t careful. 

“No, I can’t tell you myself. I didn’t do too much look into it. I told you, I turned the job down. But…” he said when Connor wilted again, “I can put the man who did it into your hands, and from there, we can see what we can find, alright?”

“You… can do that?” Connor asked in shock. “My team said that the name the cops found out was pretty common and…”

“And they don’t know that the man who did it used another merc’s helmet style and roughly the same outfit to pose as a merc who didn’t do it,” Informant countered. “They won’t know what to do. But I can tell you for sure that the contact was taken by a merc with a team called the Innies. And I can put him, can put Demoman, right into the palm of your hand. All you have to do is shake on the deal.”

The hand stretched out to him seemed like that of the devil, making a bargain for Connor’s very soul. 

It was a deal he couldn’t begin to turn down.


	6. Sixth Lock

Apparently when you work with a mercenary on the caliber of the Informant, you just don’t ask questions. Or, rather, you didn’t expect to get your questions answered. Miles was living with that revelation now as he lay stretched out on the floor behind a small wall of crates he had made for himself hours before in his boredom. There were plenty of things around the abandoned factory’s grounds, most of them filled with parts to who knew what, and very few of them hard to push around. So, after sending a message to his team that he had a mission he was pulling with the Informant, to ‘assure that he doesn’t fuck with us in the future,’ he had set about gathering up the materials around him. 

Fort building had never been a thing that really amused Miles when he’d been growing up, mostly because his parents had a far less than amused stance to him stealing all the cushions in the sitting room so he could make a very comfortable creation in the family room. Granted the estate staff had been amused by his first few attempts as a child, and more than once he’d found additional resources just ‘appeared.’ But then it was deemed an inappropriate pursuit and the staff had been told that they weren’t to encourage him anymore, and that had been the end of that. 

Still, Miles was a bit proud of the creation he rested behind. Sure, it was little more than a simple wall with spaces between the the top boxes that were wide enough to shoot through without really coming too far out of cover. And there was a hard to see, even from his side, gap between the boxes and the wall on one side that would allow him to slip out of his nook and get into the open grounds. That particular thing had taken nearly an hour to make, with him climbing out over and over again to make sure his little escape wasn’t all that visible. Fort making, Miles had decided, was serious fucking business. Like all of tonight seemed to be. More serious was the messages stacking up from his team that he didn’t know when he’d get the chance to respond to, if he ever did at all. 

All told, it had taken him two hours to make his special little area, and while he liked it, the half hour since completion had been utterly boring. No news, in this case, wasn’t necessarily good news. Miles sighed and pulled his hand from under his head where it had been acting as a pillow, and raised it up into the sky. Carefully his eyes traced the vine and rose pattern that had once been the doorknob to Claudia’s bedroom. Still it was burned into the back of his hand, but already the intensity of the scar tissue was starting to fade away. There were still days it ached with remembered pain, when the pain lanced through him and made him smell and taste smoke and his eyes would sting with remembered tears. Or fresh tears. Or maybe just the sorts of tears that came from smoke getting into eyes. At this point it was hard to tell. 

But he had to wonder. What if some day the scar faded, and with it, the memory of all he had lost? Could he say at this point that he remembered the sound of his mother’s laughter? The smile Claudia wore whenever Roxanna was at her side? The smell of his father’s aftershave and hair gel together? What did he lose when he lost all of that? 

“York!” a cheerful voice called out as Miles heard the distant door of the factory roll open. “Brought you a lovely little present!”

“Fuck you,” another voice, one he didn’t recognize, snapped at the happy tones of the Informant. “Let me go you fuck, or you’re going to have my whole team down on you like…”

“Please, just stop trying to threaten me. If I was scared of you Innies, I would have hesitated to grab you,” Informant answered as Miles quickly stumbled to his feet and squeezed out of his little fort. 

Maybe he should have looked first, made sure this wasn’t a trap or there weren’t voice filters in play, but he was too excited at the prospect of finally getting revenge to really care. Luckily for him when he got into the open what he found was the Informant lashing a man in red and black to a pillar. Too much red and black to be honest. It was on his helmet, on his clothes, hell, his shoes were black with red laces and stitching and that was just overdoing it if Miles was being honest, but he wasn’t going to voice that. 

This, then, was the face of the person who had destroyed his life. So to speak. 

“One Inny, delivered as promised,” Informant announced as Miles skidded to a stop in front of him. “You weren’t too bored while I was gone, were you?”

Miles cast his attention back over his shoulder, and sure enough his fort was more than visible enough from where they stood. No chance Informant hadn’t seen it, so he didn’t even bother to answer. Instead he returned his attention to the man who had burned his family alive. The rage, the loathing of Connor was back in full force, and immediately Miles pulled his pistol, ready to shoot the man. And then there was a hand on his arm, the blue-clad Informant at his side, pushing the gun down. 

“You won’t get answers like that, Thief. Simple fact of the matter is that answers won’t be easy to come by at all. So please, let’s all take this as a mature exchange of information.”

“Fuck you,” this ‘Demoman’ spat out at both of them. “I’m not telling you fuckwits anything.”

“And you are to speak only when you’re spoken to,” Informant informed his captive with a sing-song voice that worried Miles more than just about anything else he’d heard or seen from this man since they had met hours before. Somehow the blue-clad mercenary managed to up the creepy factor every damn time he opened his mouth. This time, though, Miles hoped it would figure in his own benefit. “I need to have a moment to talk with my compatriot anyway. Thief?”

Again he was being pulled aside rather than getting to the whole point of everything from the start. What was it with people getting between him and what he wanted tonight? Or maybe the pattern had been there longer than that. Maybe it had been there all of his life. 

Still, he wasn’t going to argue with creepy-McBlueson, so he did move away when prompted, and even though he doubted they’d be overheard, he pitched his voice toward a whisper when the Informant joined him. 

“So that’s the guy?” Miles asked, already figuring it was. Had to be. Because why would the Informant bring someone other than who he promised? 

“No.”

Or there was that. 

“Well,” Informant continued with a sigh, “this is a coworker of the man who did the job, and his work name is Demoman. But I will be honest with you, York, you don’t want to be on the bad side of that particular group of mercs. For now they are pretty much the top dogs in Gulch. If I’d brought you the actual man who did it, you’d try to kill him when you got what you wanted. Which would make your life forfeit. So I brought someone who would know what you needed, but you’d have no reason to shoot.”

“No reason?” Miles snapped. “Dammit, I wanted… He’s not going to know what we need, and if he doesn’t fear for his life there is sure as hell no way we’re going to get anything from him!”

“No, that isn’t true at all,” Informant insisted, his hand coming to rest on Miles’s shoulder. “Give me twenty minutes with the guy and I’ll have what you need to know. People give information up to men like me, for money or otherwise. I can get this from him. I promise. I’m not going to lose out on someone who knows DSS’s newest security measures with bad intel. So just go wait outside, and I’ll have what you need.”

“Outside?” Miles asked, shaking his head. “Why the hell would I do that?”

Where the knife came from, he didn’t know. What Miles did know was that suddenly it was there, in the Informant’s hand, and it said everything that the other mercenary didn’t. 

“Because I know how good I am. Go wait.”

How the hell was he supposed to argue with that? 

* * * * * *

The metal wall of the factory at his back felt like ice in the cold night air, colder than any Miles had felt since coming to this place. Strange how he’d always thought the desert would always be oppressively hot. Yet here he was, his hands feeling like ice, the cold of the metal penetrating even through the faux-fur collared coat he wore over a sweatshirt and another t-shirt below that. Jakarta had told him, before they’d gone out tonight, that he needed to look into gear for what passed as winter on this miserable rock in the middle of some backwater system on the edge of colonized space. Just a few hours ago he’d barely believed her and had taken the coat she had thrust upon him after the chill had taken him on the way to the job. And now the cold passed through him in a way that didn’t make sense. 

Especially not since the tightness in his chest, the ache on the back of his hand, and the stuffiness inside his helmet made him think of something entirely different. The flames had been so hot, the smoke thick enough to cut with a knife. At first, when he’d woken, he’d been certain that it was all a dream. Even now he could remember the fleeting thing that had him before he woke, a nightmare of outrunning a wildfire. Probably had to do with the smoke he’d smelled in the air before he’d opened his eyes. It wasn’t until he had started to kick at his blankets and the sound of the alarms had really pierced his consciousness that Connor had stumbled from his bed. No time taken to grab anything other than a phone to call emergency services, and the nearest shirt he could find to hold over his mouth and nose. Like that he’d opened his door and come out into the hellscape of his home. 

When he closed his eyes the leaping flames licking hungrily at the curtains all the way down the hall toward his sister’s room were still visible. Immediately Connor had gone to his knees, to get himself as far below the smoke as he could manage, and despite the way it tore at his bare knees and the palms of his hands once he had the shirt tied in place over his face, he moved. Moved like he’d never moved before in his life, his crawling finally pushing up just a little bit to get the balls of his feet under him to let him move faster. Nothing mattered so much as getting to his sister’s door. Most of the servants were down on the first floor, the ones that lived in the house proper and not in other houses on the grounds of the estate. They’d have to take care of themselves, but he was the only one close enough to his sister’s room to check and make sure she was okay. 

At the door he almost forgot, almost reached up with his open palm to touch the knob. But no, that would be bad. So he turned his hand around and pressed the back of it to the door, less nerves, and the pain had been enough to make him shout in anger and pain and grief. Still he pounded at the door, shouting and pleading. Then the shouting forced him to draw in a large gasp of air, and then there was the smoke. He coughed and sputtered and choked, sobbing between it all. There were sirens, louder, not just those of the house. Firefighters could save Claudia, but they had to know where. He had to get out. The tears in his eyes were smoke or grief or hopelessness, but Connor backtracked toward the stairs to start making his way out and…

“York?”

The name whispered so close to him, the hand on his shoulder, they were both in the cold of a desert night, not the parched, dry heat of an entirely different kind, and they drew him forth from the recurring nightmare, no, the memory. They pulled him forth and anchored him in this moment, and blinking back tears the other man would never see, Connor turned his attention toward the Informant. 

“So?” he asked, and his voice was the same sort of rasp he remembered himself having after he woke up the first time in the hospital. Fuck. Miles cleared his throat and shook the memory off. This was a time for survival, not grief, and he needed to be Miles right now, not Connor. 

“There is a company on Adaptive, very powerful, called Charon Industries. They make everything from helmets to military grade weapons, to dishes. They’re pretty major here, have ins with the UNSC, and are expanding their market off planet,” the Informant told him, his voice soft, pitying. Fuck him and fuck that. 

“And your point?” MIles asked. 

“And the Inny says his friend was hired by someone with deep pockets. Very deep pockets. Part of the payment came in high end weaponry and a helmet upgrade to a top of the line Charon model with serious modifications for mercenary work. And, after he told me the right source to poke at, I put in a call and… Charon has been in talks to acquire DSS since about two weeks after your family’s… passing. I can’t tell you who exactly in the company put the contract out, but I can say Charon benefitted, and if you follow the money…”

His fists clenched at his sides and he forced them to relax. “Thanks. I’ll give you my frequency for that favor and lessons. We’ll do that another night, okay?”

“York, please,” the Informant said, the merc’s gloved hand tightening on MIles’s shoulder, “don’t be stupid. Don’t go after Charon. They’re rich, they’re dangerous, and they are probably one of the hardest shells to crack on the planet, whether you head for the center itself, or for one of the larger satellite offices. I’m certain your family wouldn’t want you to die for…”

“You have no fucking clue,” Connor snapped, the rage bubbling up once again. “You didn’t know them. Don’t pretend that you do. Or that you’d begin to know what they’d want or expect of me. Just… Get in touch with me through Jakarta. I’m going the fuck home.”

Except he wasn’t. Even as he started to walk away he knew he wasn’t heading back to the base any time soon. There was something else he had to do. Now or never. If he didn’t go tonight, he may never find the courage. And it was better to hit Charon before DSS had a chance to improve the locks. So long as they were relying on Connor’s own skills to keep people out, he had to go in. 

It was now, or it was never. 

And neither Miles nor Connor could fathom it being never.


	7. Final Lock

In the grand scheme of things, getting in was easy. Charon’s corporate headquarters for the city of Gulch was in one of the prime towers, the monstrously huge construction of about two-dozen constructions built insanely high that housed the nerve centers for every major organization in the city. The highest levels were said to even house the richest of the rich, people who could live their entire lives inside of the silver spire towers and never have to take their helmets off. York wasn’t entirely certain what he thought about that assertion, but there were advantages to it. After all, even the wealthiest of the wealthy had reasons to leave the buildings, and finding someone who could get him into the tower itself after hours was astonishingly easy if he was willing to use some underhanded tactics that he hadn’t considered before this. 

Not that they were too underhanded. The young heiress who had picked him up at Errera a few hours ago was probably happily sleeping off the sedative he’d slipped into her drink when she took him into the ‘little apartment daddy got her’. Then it had been a simple matter to head back into the halls and down the elevator until he was three floors above the Charon headquarters. From there, well, the elevator didn’t stop at secure levels this late at night. 

York took a deep breath as he gripped the edge of the elevator door frame with one hand, and reached for his portable hydraulic spreader with the other hand. One false move and he’d fall countless floors to his death. Well, that depending on the harness he was wearing and had anchored to a nearby support beam, but York still wasn’t certain whether he could trust it or not. Either way there was no chance he was going to put his life so immediately into its strength. So, better not to mess up this stage of the break in. 

Inside his helmet, York licked his lips as he made sure the spreader was pressed properly into the crack of the doors. A push of a button and the things would be forced apart, making room for him to slide in. From then on he’d be in a secure area, trying to avoid guards and break into an executive office. Get into their computers, find any information that might lead to the answers, and then get out. How hard was that? 

With a huff of feigned laughter, York pulled his gun with his free hand, and used his helmet’s display to remotely activate the spreader. The little device started to work, forcing the doors further and further open, his helmet measuring the distance between them. Already he could hear voices beyond it, no doubt there was going to be guns ready for him in just a moment. Too bad. He had to keep moving. 

The proper number reached York threw himself through the opening, the hand that had been on the frame slapping the harness release button as he rolled across the floor and came to his knees, gun raised before him. Two guards stood there, staring at him in shock, enough shock that York got off two shots first, taking one down with a shot to the shoulder, and the other with one to the hip. 

Bless tranq rounds. 

The men fell like sacks of flour in seconds flat, their guns clattering out of their hands and away. Not that it was enough. They were both wearing helmets, and that meant there could be bio-uplinks that would alert security that something was wrong. York rushed forward, pulling out the decoy pads he’d swiped from Madrid before the job that had gone wrong due to the Informant. One was slapped on the back of each helmet in a quick movement. The little things had small transmitters in them that should hack the helmets biocomm systems within seconds, sending false readings. Granted their active life was less than ten minutes, but even something was better than nothing. That done York switched his pistol out for the shotgun on his back, loaded with beanbag rounds, and bolted left. His schematics from a message from the Informant the previous morning said this was the best route, and he had to assume the guy wasn’t going to screw him over now. Unless the whole thing was a screw job all the way back to their meeting. But he had to take that risk. 

A crimson countdown clock shed seconds with cruel regularity as York followed the directed twists and turns, telling him how long was left on the biodecoys. Of course the time was generous. It was how much longer they could run. That number couldn’t promise him that the initial knock-out hadn’t been noticed. Or that the fallen guards wouldn’t be noted sooner than that. Nothing protected him from patrols or security check-ins. At best, though he had those quickly ticking by seconds, and by the time he made it to the door the Informant had directed him to, the number was a paltry seven minutes. Would have been better if he had looked around the corner a bit smarter. Because now he was standing in the hall with a guard rushing toward him, and fucking hell. 

The person was staring at him, or probably was under that helmet. There was something about their security uniform that was a bit off, maybe seemed a touch more padded out, but that wasn’t something York wanted to consider for now. Instead he pulled the pistol with his free hand, shot off two rounds of the tranq shots toward the stranger, and rushed forward, pulling out his final stolen biodecoy. The closer he got, the more the form seemed female, and York tried not to let that get to him as he slapped the pad into place on the collapsing form. Jakarta… 

He hadn’t spoken to her in days. 

York shook the thought off and moved quickly back to the door, putting the pistol away and slinging the shotgun over his shoulder. A light touch to the panel next to the double doors of the executive office brought up a familiar, glowing green form. 

“Whoever designed this is a genius,” he repeated to himself, a touch more pride in his voice as he set his fingers into the guts of his precious creation and started to turn. He made it halfway into the first twist and flex before the thing went crimson. 

He knew, of course, what happened the second the color changed. The tiniest bit of increased resistance should have clued him in, and Connor cursed his rush as the alarms tore into the air around him. 

“Okay,” he grit out as he quickly forced the lock through a secondary unlocking method. It was a brute force method compared to the elegance his over-confident technique would have given him, but there was no time to contemplate that now. “I take it back. Whoever designed this is an asshole.”

Whether that was him, or some R&D tech already having found and taken out the previous vulnerability in a few short days was beyond him. Hell, maybe it was even that Charon, if they were behind all of this, happened to be keeping the fix to their own locks to make them even more secure against over-confident fuckwits like himself. Either way as the sirens blared and he was certain security was going to be down on him in seconds, so York just did his best to force the lock. It didn’t matter what it took. He had to get into the computer here. That was the only way he was going to find the answer. The only chance he had at… 

Too much attention on the lock, he didn’t realize that the security guard he had just taken down hadn’t actually gone down until there was a hand on his shoulder. York cursed as he was whirled around and slammed bodily against the door. A voice in his mind screamed that it didn’t make sense, two darts should have put the woman down for a damn long time, but there she was, the body down the hall gone, and there were hands grabbing his wrists before he could reach for a weapon. 

“Don’t fight me, you idiot,” the woman hissed at him. “I’m not here to hurt you.”

“Well, seeing as you’re security and I’m decidedly up to no good…” York started to say, and then the woman thumped him against the door again. 

“The Informant sent me. Unlike you, I was smart enough to take the uniform and helmet off of a security guard when I got in. Geez,” the woman shook her head. “Come on, we’re going.”

“How the hell do you expect me to believe you?”

The helmet rolled like someone might roll their eyes, and the sigh he got with it was pretty impressive. 

“What, Thief, do you want me to say something stupid like ‘come with me if you want to live’? Because I’m not going to. Informant sent me as backup for some infiltration idiot called York, and if you’re some other infiltration idiot I’m cool to wait for him, but…”

“If he sent you, then you can watch my back as I get what I came here f…”

The word didn’t even make it out of his mouth before there was a sharp blow to his gut that drove the air from his lungs and all thought from his mind. If he managed to stay conscious even a second longer, he might have lamented being taken down in a single punch, or the undignified way he was slung over the stranger’s shoulder and carried away. As it was he didn’t think much at all. 

* * * * * *

There were a lot of things wrong about how he woke up. First of all, there wasn’t a helmet on his head. The last months had gotten Connor, Miles, York used to the minor claustrophobia that came with being in the thing more often than he wasn’t. Second, he was stretched out on something soft, with something else warm over him, and he was pretty certain that jail cells didn’t come with cushions. Third of all, there was a woman with crimson hair, vibrant green eyes, and an expression of serious disappointment on a fine-boned face looming over him, radiating active disapproval. None of that matched up with his last memory of being stopped by a security guard in the Charon offices. 

“And now the idiot wakes,” the woman sighed, and her voice matched up to what he thought he might remember through the haze of his suddenly present and pounding headache. 

“Not an idiot,” York protested as he started to sit up. And then there were firm hands on his shoulders, pressing him back down. 

“You are, because a few minutes after I knocked you out, you were trying to squirm out of my grip while you were lashed to my shoulder in an elevator shaft,” the woman countered, holding him down. “I had to shoot you with your own tranq darts.”

Oh, that might explain why his mouth felt like a shag carpet. “Who…?”

“You may call me your hero, but I’d prefer Raleigh for right now,” she answered, hands coming away and he watched as they moved to pick up a glass of water and a pill of some sort. “Here, for the headache you no doubt have.”

Really? He gave her an incredulous look, tweaking his eyebrow just enough to ask ‘you really think I’m going to take that from you’? Except even that much movement made his head scream with pain, and he just reached for the water and medication. Hopefully it was medication at least. 

“You ruined everything,” he mumbled at her after he chugged the water and had the pill safely hidden in his stomach. 

“You’re the one that set off the alarm,” she countered readily. 

“Would have been calmer, caught the trap, if I hadn’t been stressed by seeing you in the hall.”

“And you would have known I was coming as backup if you responded to any of your messages from our mutual friend.”

Well that was a description York wouldn’t apply to the Informant. In fact, he scoffed at it, and the woman chuckled in response. What a beautiful, musical sound that cut like knives through his pained skull. 

“Hate to break it to you, but I don’t really have friends here,” he grumbled weakly, moving just enough to drape an arm over his eyes. The lights in here were far too bright for his liking. 

“I think that’s about to change,” the woman, Raleigh, informed him. 

“Why do you say that?”

“Because, York… the enemy of my enemy is my friend. And I can say quite simply that I have more than a few bones of my own to pick with Charon. When you’re back on your feet, we’ll figure out a plan that can satisfy the need both of us have to make the company fear us. How does that sound?”

York lifted his arm just enough to keep out at her from the comfortable shadow of his arm. The grin she wore was fierce, and decidedly not one he wanted to earn by provoking her ire. 

“Tell you what, how about you tell me why you want to bring them down, and I’ll see if I want to work with you,” he offered. 

With that her smile softened just the littlest bit. 

“Yeah,” the woman answered with a light laugh. “We’ll do that when you wake up again?”

“Again?” York asked, and he could hear the slur in his own voice, feel the heaviness to his eyes. 

“Yeah, best thing for you right now, judging by how red those eyes of yours are, is to get some real sleep. When was the last time you rested?” 

There was almost concern in her voice. York waved it on. “When you knocked me out.”

That only made her smile a tiny bit wider, and he was definitely caught up in how that looked. 

“Well, the pain killer I gave you is also a sedative. So how about we regroup in a few hours?”

“Bitch,” he slurred out, and the woman nodded in agreement. 

“Maybe. But I promise there will be pizza when you’re on your feet. And then we’ll see what we can do to topple one of the most powerful companies on the planet.”

With those words in his ears, words that rung with a firmness that sounded a bit like a promise, York closed his eyes. Maybe it wouldn’t hurt to sleep just a little bit longer. Maybe when he woke up it would be in his bed back at home, and all of this would be a bad dream. 

And if not, well, he would make the world around him tremble in fear.


End file.
